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Digital disruption is motivating major corporations to tear up their legacy playbooks and go social as they seek the secret sauce for providing great customer experiences (CX). This, in turn, is accelerating demand for people with advanced web development and modern marketing smarts, as companies work feverishly to outflank competitors.

But a bold new economic model is emerging as to how those anxiously sought skills will be provided. They’ll increasingly come from an emerging army of mobile mercenaries who see their careers paths not in traditional jobs, but rather as a series of contracting gigs enabling them to tackle cutting-edge challenges.

That was the message Monday evening at The Forbes Forum in New York City, in a panel on how technology is supporting entrepreneurship. Sponsored by United Airlines, the discussion blended perspectives from both established vendors working hard to infuse their cultures with CX-based thinking and from startups born with postdesktop DNA.

“What do people want today?” asked panelist Thomas O’Toole, senior vice president for marketing and loyalty at United. “They want three things: To be connected, mobile, and informed.”

Those three horsemen of the untethered internet are increasingly being enlisted in service of optimum CX. O’Toole pointed to United’s plethora of Pacific and Great Circle routes as providing the rationale for the airline’s decision to eschew traditional air-to-ground networking and instead install satellite-based Wi-Fi. The service, which took flight in January, enables customers to stay continuously connected midocean.

Personalized marketing may be the biggest meme that’s emerging as mobility gets mashed up with big data. “The use of data to perform, advance, and enable the customer experience is where we’re putting the most time in,” O’Toole said. He pointed to the airline’s increasing ability to push out customer-engagement messages tuned for different constituencies. These include lapsed customers, so-called splitters who are seeing another airline on the side, and even passengers currently in-flight, who can have targeted e-mails waiting when they land.

Servicing the Servicers

Because modern marketing is still relatively new, it’s perhaps a surprise that an early adopter like O’Toole sees technology as even more of a challenge than changing corporate cultures. Yet it’s precisely because of this high-technology bar that a cadre of big data, CX, marketing, web-dev, and various other specialized startups and consultants are springing up.

Gene Zaino, CEO of MBO Partners, believes larger businesses will increasingly tap into this growing cohort of independent operators for help. “The individual economy is an important part of the overall economy,” Zaino said during the panel discussion. “In five years, we’re going to be approaching an independent majority—more people working independently than employed.”

Indeed, Zaino believes the rise of tech guns for hire isn’t merely a cyclical change sparked by the Great Recession of 2008. “It’s a structural change,” he said. “You’re getting a pool of experts and specialists. It’s very easy to tap them now.” (That’s Zaino’s skin in the game. His MBO Partners provides a business support platform for consultants, including handling compliance—a requirement small operations are often unaware of.)

To be clear, today’s modern mobile worker has little in common with the archetypical, pajama-wearing contractor of the dial-up days. Zaino notes the need for face-to-face contact, especially when projects are strategic and are budgeted at $50,000 or more. But that’s no stumbling block for the denizens of the new digital economy. “These people are constantly moving around,” he said. “The concept of an office has changed. It’s about who you want to be part of.”

As the practice becomes widespread, Zaino sees many companies operating with a core group of employees who are supplemented by a rotating cadre of contractor contributors.

O’Toole pointed to a potential evolution in interactions on corporate Twitter feeds. “The interesting phenomenon that I’m seeing is dialogue between social-media participants,” he said. “In effect, there will be a moderator voice from a peer.”

Final Fodder

Also on the panel was Georg Petschnigg, CEO and cofounder of Fiftythree. He believes that both geographic and age diversity among employees are vital components for success. Fiftythree, best known for its “Paper” iPad app, has headquarters in both New York and Seattle, hence Petschnigg’s bicoastal perspective.

Petschnigg argued for the importance of variety among developers by noting that “programmers who sustain themselves on pizza will build one type of product.”

Dave Hilfman, senior vice president of sales, also sat on the panel. The discussion was moderated by Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard. “The mobile revolution is really an attitude,” he said during the event. “It’s not he or she who has the best smartphone. It’s managing contacts, tapping the right talent.”

Artdex: Social network for artists and collectors, now in beta, scheduled for fall launch. I met founder Jenny Park Adam at the Forbes event, and found this effort to build a cloud-based online community for people interested in art worth a mention. FacebookFacebook page here;LinkedInLinkedIn page here.

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